Embracing the Unembraced: Being one with the Translated Thooppukkaari

Thooppukaari is a Tamil novel by Malarvathi the young woman writer who bagged the Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puraskar Award in 2013. Mary Flora, whose pen name is Malarvathi, is a young budding writer, who hails from Vellicode of Kanniyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. It is the simple and plain style of the language used with the mishmash of the colloquial dialect of Vilanvancode taluk of Kanniyakumari district, Tamil Nadu that won her the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar National Award. The tactics that Malarvathi employs through the dialectal words is a sincere revelation of her feelings. The novel helps the reader to comprehend the exploitation, the discrimination, the trauma, the forced labour, the unimpressive appearance and the neglected hunger of the sweeper community in line with the varied layers of the story.

The Rise of English Prose

This chapter offers a social history of the emergence of a standardized vernacular English prose in the sixteenth century. As national networks of trade and administration formed in late medieval and Tudor England, new channels of communication were forged alongside them. In these conditions, written forms stabilized, while rates of literacy rose. By the end of the sixteenth century, England had become a single linguistic community with shared conventions of writing. An emerging capitalism thus powerfully shaped England’s written language, a fact that has implications for the history of style and genres. The rise of the plain style and the emergence of new genres of prose at the end of the sixteenth century both offer compelling case studies of how English norms of writing emerged out of practical communications.

When Your Boss Says, “You Need to Sound More Professional”: Writing Style and Writer Attributions

One line of prior research has focused on the effect of style on readers’ ability to comprehend or willingness to engage with a message. A separate line has illuminated the effect of errors on the impressions readers form about writers, identifying potentially serious consequences (e.g., the willingness to accept the writer as a coworker or to fund the writer’s business pitch). To date, few studies have investigated the effect of style on the impressions readers form of business writers. In this paper, we report a study of the relationship between business writer attributions and word- or sentence-level style features often emphasized by advocates of plain style. Using data from 614 respondents, we found statistically significant evidence that business writers conveyed (a) confidence by avoiding non-requisite words, jargon, and nominals and by using standard connotations and grammar, and (b) professionalism by avoiding non-requisite words and hedges and by using standard homonyms.

The event semantics of conjuncts in ‘The Sun Also Rises’

The present paper explores the semantics of Hemingway’s ‘plain style’ in The Sun Also Rises by combining corpus linguistic methodology with event semantics theory. The focus of the study is on how the narrator of the novel segments experienced situations in terms of semantic events. Corpus linguistic analysis shows that the ‘plain style’ of the narrative section of the novel is realized by means of coordinated clauses and that the narrator’s event segmentation is associated with a small set of preferred lexical items. These results are interpreted in terms of event semantics to show that preferred lexical items are indicative of event types typical of the narrative section. The semantic analysis of relations between coordinated clauses indicates that these relations are not simply about the juxtaposition of disjoined events. Finally, the study demonstrates that an approach combining corpus linguistic methodology with insights from event semantics can offer new understanding of the propositional meaning of literary texts, and the way narrators encode experienced situations.

“Let me heare … if thou canst say”: The Utility of the Prayer Book Catechism (1549–1604)

This article explores the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, shedding light on the emergence of instructional writing from oral instruction. The 1549 text evinces qualities of preliterate oral communication identified by Ong. By contrast, the 1604 addendum reveals a trend toward modern plain style, which is even more pronounced in the 1647 Westminster Shorter Catechism. The evidence indicates the oral features were useful to the text’s technical aims. What Ramist plain style gains in precision and objectivity comes at the cost of other useful features, such as reiteration, contextualization, and agonism, which (in Tannen's phrase) involve a greater relative focus on interpersonal involvement between speaker and auditor/ reader.

PERCEPTIONAL DIMENSIONS OF AUDIENCE -WORK INTERACTION IN MINIMALISM ART MOVEMENT

One of the breaking points of the change that art has undergone in terms of both form and content is Minimalism. There are processes that affect the existence of every art movement. The sociocultural structure that emerged after the World Wars has had influence in the field of art, as in many other fields. The Abstract Expressionism movement that emerged in this period, aimed at rejecting the familiar structure of painting, detached objects from their real-world forms / characteristic structures and included unusual artistic forms in the process. Despite this hard-to-perceive automatism-based complex structuring put forward by the Abstract Expressionism movement in art, it is a common belief that Minimalism, which aims at plain and simple forms based on logic in painting and sculpture, is "a reaction against Abstract Expressionism". Despite the "subjective" based complex formalism that Abstract Expressionists have created with the intensity of emotion, Minimalists have revealed their understanding of art with the "objective" based forms they have created as a result of a planned effort. However, the simplicity of the forms in Minimalism should not bring to mind the idea that the intellectual dimension in the essence of the works can be easily perceived. The existence of conceptual values should be taken into consideration in the formation of minimal forms. Although minimal art is shaped with an "objective" approach, it is important to reveal the sociocultural motivations that affect the formation of the works in the essence of the audience's ability to perceive the works. Minimalism, which centers the interaction of "industry, object and art", opens a critical space for the audience, who are the receptors of art, regarding the state of art. On the basis of this criticism, beyond its plain style, Minimal art's complex conceptual (intellectual) structure can be manifested. Purpose of this research, To reveal the intellectual foundations that affect the formation of Minimal art and to touch on the perceptual dimensions of the minimal artworks and audience interaction. In this research conducted within the framework of the title of "Perceptual Dimensions of Audience-Work Interaction in Minimalism Art Movement", scanning method has been used to obtain information and documents. The obtained information and documents have been used in a way that provides integrity for the purpose of the research. Keywords: art, Minimalism, object, Conceptual Art, perception, audience